In the wake of his recent humanitarian visit to Cuba, RICHARD BURGON points to the now urgent need to defend the island’s political sovereignty and its right to self-determination
THE FIRST principle in war reporting is never to believe an official source. I became even more convinced of this when, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, a provincial governor I was interviewing insisted that poppy production had been suppressed but that it was bad weather that made our flight out of his parish impossible.
As I looked along the valley glowing red with poppies, set against a perfect azure sky, I thought that the evident proximity of mojahedin with their newly CIA-supplied Stinger missiles might be a more compelling reason for our delay. And unless a new tulip-growing enterprise had seized the imagination of his Afghan villagers, that the governor was colour blind.
It is impossible to judge how the Ukraine war is going from even the closest reading of our mass media.
The defence secretary’s resignation reveals not a split over principle but a dispute over pace of military spending, as Britain’s political Establishment unites behind deeper Nato commitments, argues NICK WRIGHT
SEVIM DAGDELEN asks why the European Union is targeting the Swiss academic Jacques Baud, cutting off his access to banking services
Washington plays innocent bystander while pouring weapons and intelligence into Ukraine, just as it enables the Gaza genocide — but every US escalation leaves Ukraine weaker than the neutrality deal rejected in 2022, argue MEDEA BENJAMIN and NICOLAS JS DAVIES


